Hard Time: Really as effective a punishment?

I don't buy that giving somebody a simulation of incarceration is as much of a deterrent as real prison. Besides the fact that real prison causes you to miss years of your life and has a huge physical toll, aren't most prisoners aware that it's not real?

O'Brien didn't know how Agrathi punish people, so when he accidentally kills his cellmate after falsely accusing him of hiding food, it has a tremendous psychological effect. If you knew it was fake, you'd probably be like 'Oh, NO did I kill my fake cellmate? How terribly awful of me I feel SO bad!'

And sociopaths wouldn't even feel bad about killing their cellmate, they'd come out thinking 'HA I get to go back to my regular life, some punishment.' Then they'd start committing crimes with total abandon thinking, worst case scenario, I get another fake prison experience and go right back to my life AGAIN.

And why don't they use this technology for people with terminal illnesses or very old people nearing death? Hey I have cancer, oh darn it, guess I'll have to spend 50 years in a paradise simulation.

Besides the fact that real prison causes you to miss years of your life and has a huge physical toll, aren't most prisoners aware that it's not real?

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There are probably built-in "safeguards" to make sure the prisoners don't realize it's not real. Subtle psychological cues to make them think it IS real, and/or forget (if they already knew) how the Argrathi do this.

I don't buy that giving somebody a simulation of incarceration is as much of a deterrent as real prison. Besides the fact that real prison causes you to miss years of your life and has a huge physical toll, aren't most prisoners aware that it's not real?

O'Brien didn't know how Agrathi punish people, so when he accidentally kills his cellmate after falsely accusing him of hiding food, it has a tremendous psychological effect. If you knew it was fake, you'd probably be like 'Oh, NO did I kill my fake cellmate? How terribly awful of me I feel SO bad!'

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People know holodeck simulations are fake but we've seen several times where people are so immersed that it doesn't matter. They know that physically nothing is real, but emotionally it is and that overcomes the lack of it being reality.

And sociopaths wouldn't even feel bad about killing their cellmate, they'd come out thinking 'HA I get to go back to my regular life, some punishment.' Then they'd start committing crimes with total abandon thinking, worst case scenario, I get another fake prison experience and go right back to my life AGAIN.

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That's assuming that they give everyone the same punishment. Maybe murderers get the death penalty or since they are great with mind altering they brainwash sociopaths into being "normal"/"good" like the Nebari do in Farscape.

And why don't they use this technology for people with terminal illnesses or very old people nearing death? Hey I have cancer, oh darn it, guess I'll have to spend 50 years in a paradise simulation.

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Maybe they do. We got to see about 20 secs of them in the "real world" and it was in a lab or whatever. We have little idea of what their society is like apart from that for certain crimes you get sent to imaginary brain gaol.

The Agrathi penal system may not be about corrections or rehabilitation or deterrence, only punishment. And then Agrathi may not want to inflict "real" punishment because of reasons, so they create "virtual" punishments.

And a criminal without remorse or conscience wouldn't suffer as O'Brien did, so perhaps each punishment is uniquely created for each criminal.

This Agrathi mind technology may extend well beyond their criminal justice system. It may be used extensively in all aspects of their society, as reward and punishment and more.

Yeah, I always figured the program was tailored to the offender. A child rapist would probably end up with a cell mate who constantly rapes him, a murderer would probably be beaten by his cell mate routinely and so forth.